To be fair, that was what a lot of people thought about Apple making a cell phone. That they'd never compete with Nokia or Motorola and that US carriers would never give them enough control.
The carrier thing was true, but they could have launched outside the US. Instead they found a carrier desperate enough.
But they’ve never done safety critical stuff like a car. Of highly mechanical stuff like a car. Or things that need something of a dealer network the way a car does (existing Apple stores wouldn’t cut it). And really I’m not sure how much they could add a special “Apple touch” outside infotainment/interior controls compared to luxury automakers.
If they a fully self driving car by 2018 and beat everyone by 7 years maybe. But as time went on it went from little to almost no sense.
I enjoyed following it for that reason. But I never thought it would happen.
The right time was between 2010 (iPad launch) and 2014 (CarPlay launch), with a complete infotainment-only product.
Essentially, mimic the iPhone-on-one-carrier bargain.
Go to a struggling automaker (Fiat Chrysler?) and say "What if we told you that you won't have to worry about any of your infotainment solutions? We'll build the unit, in exchange for owning the exclusive app store it uses. And you'll get to say your cars are powered by Apple." Win/win.
Instead, they dicked around until the automakers figured their consoles out (mostly... still looking at you angrily, Nissan) and Apple was left without a key differentiator.
Hell, the mind-numbingly obvious reason for Apple -- do it at a loss for the real-time mapping and traffic data!!
People forget that when the iPhone launched, carriers had an iron grip on their customers, to the extent of "pay us to put ringtones on our device that temporarily happens to be in your hands."
iPhone-in-car would have let Apple dangle some interesting data deals in front of car manufacturers, while retaining ultimate control, before the car manufacturers realized data was a monetizable revenue stream.
And SpaceX had never launched a rocket into space, until they had.
I don’t get this idea of a company like Apple not being able to get into a space, when tiny startups get into spaces all the time. Nobody expected Tesla to take on Ford either, but here we are. Surely Apples massive vault of cash doesn’t decrease their chances on ideas that fall outside their specialty.
One is an established tech company trying to do business in a space it’s unfamiliar with. It has existing forces pulling it in a certain direction because it already makes money in those ways. Google is the perfect example of how this hampers innovation. It’s one of the reasons the concept of Alphabet exists.
SpaceX has one singular purpose. It’s not like it was trying to counterbalance its burgeoning space business with existing cost and profit centers that are not even tangentially related to its primary goal
Apple used to be organized differently than other big companies, and more like multiple startups. Just look at the trajectory of other PC builders of the 90’s.
But they were working towards that all the time. And then SpaceX didn't try to make a car, Tesla was started as a mostly-separate company to make a car. Because there's very little business synergy between those two things.
That cash ironically is an obstacle to Apple being able to innovate. Instead of creative problem solving it solves problems with cash. Instead of collaborating and recruiting people to come work for a common vision, they join to pursue cash and status. Apple is nothing but a “phone company” with a bank attached, which is fine, it will continue to operate, but it won’t continue to grow and innovate.
Apple is rather frugal with acquisitions and hires and somewhat frugal with salaries.
That’s not quite how that happened. They were turned down and laughed out of the room by nearly every carrier they approached. The only one that didn’t was AT&T; but they definitely weren’t “desperate” at the time.
They had lots of leverage, which is how they got exclusivity.
And it worked out.
You’re right Apple was riding high on the iPod, they weren’t in any danger of going under. They could have waited longer.
I think it would have been funny if they released it in Europe or something where the carriers weren’t in control and then told Americans “call your carrier, sorry, they wouldn’t let us”. Not that that would have ever happened.
AT&T wasn't desperate, and I'm sure Jobs would have preferred to skip on exclusivity, since that really didn't serve iPhone.
"Desperate for more customers"? Well sure, but I'm sure Verizon was even more desperate for more customers considering they were so close to being number one (AT&T was number one at the time, by a slim margin). After all, Pepsi literally bought restaurants and forced them to serve Pepsi in order to force consumers to drink their sodas from the runner up spot.
I don't have any reference for this, but just on its face it would make sense that if Apple needed to sweeten the pot for a carrier to allow it, exclusivity was a way to do it, and it would have been in Apple's best interest to pick the carrier with the biggest market share at the time, which was AT&T.
EDIT: Others corrected me that at the time the deal was signed in 2005 and during the famous 2007 keynote, the partner was Cingular. Through a series of M&A Cingular became what we know of as AT&T, and by the time the phone launched in July 2007, it was AT&T who held the deal.
Interestingly,
> Cingular chief executive Stan Sigman signed a secretive deal with Apple in 2005 before seeing any designs or prototypes of the phone. Other carriers had been scared off by Apple's reputation for controlling every aspect of its products. But Cingular and AT&T leadership saw the partnership's promise.
In Jobs' keynote he referred to Cingular as the #1 carrier with 58 million subscribers. I think the logic above still makes sense given that.
The carrier the iPhone launched with in the US was AT&T. While they were neck in neck with Verizon at the time, AT&T had the technical majority of the market. How were they desperate?
> Cingular chief executive Stan Sigman signed a secretive deal with Apple in 2005 before seeing any designs or prototypes of the phone. Other carriers had been scared off by Apple's reputation for controlling every aspect of its products. But Cingular and AT&T leadership saw the partnership's promise.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Wireless_Services
Only in hindsight. At the time Apple had tried once before with the Rockr, and it really sucked.
The iPhone launch was wonderful because it changed the game enough for a 2G phone to be an acceptable trade off in a 3G market.
It was not clear at all that would happen before the launch presentation.
Steve Jobs said that Motorola were calling the shots which is why Apple decided to do its own phone.
All this news tells me is that Apple is putting EV in the back burner since users are still not convinced about EVs in the long-term. AI is here to stay so it makes sense pivoting the team to that. Hell, the AI might make it into their cars for all we know.
I’m so tired of people claiming apples walled garden gives them magic abilities. It has nothing to do with this. Do you really think people are going to pay an extra $30,000 for a car because it works with the iPhone?
I have an iPhone. I love Apple stuff. I’m not paying any premium for an Apple car, they have to convince me it’s worth it over the competition.
Given that 30k is the difference between an entry level and mid level car, sure. The premium brands would definitely want to get Apple's branding under their wing, and those buyers are already used to paying a premium when they can buy a $30k car.
Sure Apple’s $60k car is better than a $30k Honda. But is it better than a $60k Acura or BMW or Lexus?
That’s where I think the trouble would be.
Yes. People happily pay an extra 1-200% for something because it's Apple, all the time. I'll probably never understand why, but I've come to accept that they do.
Now headphones are a sizable market for Apple. So many of my friends are awaiting the refreshed AirPods Max. The same people that said they would never buy AirPods when they launched.
That's the thing. With other Apple devices, they're not simple bluetooth headphones. They have added features and functionality that only really work with other Apple products due to their proprietary protocols on top of regular Bluetooth. _No_ other Bluetooth headphones can work quite like Airpods do, because of the walled garden. So, you have your expensive Apple headphones that only really give full functionality with Apple devices so you're more likely to keep buying an iPhone. And vice-versa, you have more of a reason to buy the expensive Apple headphones because no other headphones will give the full experience the Apple headphones can give you on that platform.
Are there really features that Apple is going to bake into their cars to ensure it only really gets those features for Apple users? Like what, the head unit will only work with an iPhone? Would you really buy a $30,000+ piece of equipment that necessitated a specific phone model to actually get a lot of key features out of it?
Uh yes, of course. I would be highly surprised if there weren't. That's Apple's MO.
Green bubble vs blue bubble another example.
Also it would be odd for a physical thing you can crash/scratch. I mean you can hire or lease cars but there is generally a heavy cost if you trash it to be picked either by you or your insurance company.
Despite all the glittery rhetoric that "a car is just a computer on wheels", this always seemed like a bizarre move for Apple and I've never seen anyone explain what the strategic vision was supposed to be. Even with full lv5 autonomy, what's Apple's unique twist? Big monitors for watching TV+ in the car? That wouldn't have been remotely enough.
I wish we could read the internal emails on it.
Before they released the AirPods, they bought Beats. It would along the same lines but with a way more complex machine.
Same as the rest of apples brand: "it just works". The seemless, polished integration of their products gave them a devoted fanbase that pays a huge premium over competition.
Sure they do. Facebook was so confident in VR they rebranded their entire company. Elon Musk got his horrible bluff called out and he owns the largest social media site (for now). It's not business related, but the CEO of Amazon owns a national newspaper.
Apple car didn't come out of nowhere. They and Google were working on Car Os's for years and we both know Apple cares hough about vertical integration to shun off Intel and Nvidia in order to make their own chips. Regardless of my confidence in the idea, the act itself is consistent with Apple.
No one thought they would do VR and they did.
No one thought they would compete with Netflix and their movies are winning awards now.
No one thought they would cannibalize the iPod with a phone and they did.
The state of US tech companies is that they will also go into new markets. When Netflix came out, did you really think Amazon and Apple would get into that market? To Apple, cars are an untapped sector they'll want to tackle when their existing sectors are saturated.
The launch of the iPhone was rumored for a long while and seemed obvious to me and a lot of other people who paid attention to the smartphone space that they'd release something. More and more phones were being sold with music capabilities and were starting to get popular. If Apple didn't release the iPhone within a few years, competitors selling better all-in-one kind of devices (like the modern smartphone today) would have been there. Its just flash memory at the time was still rather expensive for a lot of songs, and even the first generation or two of iPhones had pretty weak storage compared to a regular full-fat iPod.
What has this VR achieved? Nothing so far.
Cannibalising your own product isn’t an achievement
They have never shipped a large physical product or anything mechanical in the entire history of the company, this is outright delusional.
Let’s take iTunes. People were clowning Apple for releasing Apple Music because they had millions of people buying Music on iTunes. Spotify showed it could work but they weren’t exactly making money over fist.
“The new Samsung ring came out this morning. At 11:30 the entire management resigned in unison apologizing and cancelled the project due to low sales.”
A month of near 0 buzz for apples introduction to the era of “spatial computing”
Usually Apple parades around a few exemplar apps or use cases, but for the vision pro, it was just business meetings?
imo just having infinite floating screens is a better feature to show off.
Everyone wanted to see what phone software developed by an actual computer company who knew software would look like. Everyone and their brother wanted to see what an iPod phone would look like.
The Apple phone was perhaps the most anticipated device in years. What surprised people wasn't that they released one, it was that they went all in on a capacitive touch screen, which was novel tech, and that it didn't have real mobile data or native apps. There was this long song and dance about how apps were to be replaced by web pages but people were still skeptical.
Yeah and the first iPhones were terrible if you didn't jailbreak them
The App Store became publicly available just one year after the original iPhone was released too - people seem to make out as if Apple held on for years and years but the SDK was announced less than six months after the iPhone’s release and was made available to developers a couple of months later.
Even with Pocket IE, a lot of pages did render pretty decently. I was able to browse and post on phpBB boards and what not with it.
The browser built-in on the various Symbian devices I owned were also pretty decent. They were built on WebKit, supported real CSS, working JavaScript support, and more.
When you're talking about browsers on mobiles, are you talking just WAP browsers on dumbphones or actual smartphones?
Apple have always developed core products that are essentially a computer.
Even though cars increasingly look like laptops on wheels, the actual computer bit is relatively minor and the user interface is mostly the wheel and pedals, not so much the screen.
Ha, it seems like that to you because you are obviously a car person! For someone like me ideal Apple car would be something without any kind of wheels or pedals. Instead, I should be able to crawl drunk into it, mumble "Siri, take me home" and pass out snoring loudly on the back seat. I guess several years ago when it seemed that (true) self-driving cars are just around the corner Apple had something similar in mind.
The closest thing they've made to a car is those wheels for the mac pro.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-w...
700 bucks, now just imagine what one would have to pay for the wheels on your shiny new applecar
Now I'm wondering why it existed it all.
iPods were just mid-tier consumer-electronics expensive; which, back in ~2005, was nowhere near entry-level smartphone expensive, let alone flagship smartphone expensive.
Then, after the iPhone started getting rev after rev, Apple's "lean manufacturing" cost-optimizations gradually led to "an iPod" just becoming a particular assemblage of reused old iPhone parts, optimized for manufacturing cost and battery life. All the other iPods died out, leaving only the iPod Touch, there to consume old iPhone parts off the line.
Around six years after that, "a commodity Android phone" became as cheap as an iPod Touch. At that point, the Touch continued to exist mostly due to brand value, and its ability to run iOS games (still a specific / "better" market than Android games, back then), without having to pay for an iPhone to do that.
It's only in the last five years that it began to make economic sense to just get your 6yo who wanted to play iOS games an old iPhone rather than a "new" iPod Touch. It was at the exact moment that happened, that Apple finally killed the iPod Touch.
Yep. Well said. The cost of a full phone + expensive plan is a lot.
Plus kids wanted the apps (really games) the iPhone had. Apple wanted to sell them games.
And besides that parents were far more hesitant to give young kids phones than (for better or worse) than today.
The final reason I’ve heard is the number of hand-me-down phones given to kids now that smartphones are ubiquitous means sales slowly fell to ver little compared to when introduced.
It would be surprising if we had stats on iPad versus non-iPad kids and what percentage of them ended up being iPhone users, and those stats didn't show a strong correlation.
Computers run software the user asks for, phones run the software the phone manufacturer allows it to.
But as soon as it became clear that wasn’t going to be an option I don’t understand why they didn’t just give up and instead seemed to try to shift towards a more normal car.
You had your Windows Mobile and Symbian devices, which were popular among hardcore turbonerds, but normies weren't interested in them. And that goes double for the US; there was more uptake of WinMo and Symbian in Europe, but very little in Apple's home market. The closest thing to a "normie" smartphone before the iPhone was BlackBerry, but most people who had one were business users who had their device issued and provisioned by their employer. And enthusiasts always pooh-poohed BlackBerries as "not a real smartphone" because it was basically just a messaging and groupware beast with limited general-purpose capabilities.
So there was a big gap to be filled. Enthusiasts had their market segment, business users had their market segment, but the ordinary consumers had nothing. And Apple gladly swooped in to fill this gap.
The problem is that cars are already ubiquitous, especially in the US. What can an iCar offer that a Toyota can't? Hell, even if you specify electric cars, other companies still have this covered. What can Apple offer that Tesla can't? And if you look internationally, it's even worse. You start selling electric cars outside the US market, you're going to end up going head-to-head with Chinese giants like BYD that are already kicking Tesla's ass outside the US.
The only real path forward for an iCar that does to cars what the iPhone did to phones is if Apple were to perfect true Level 5 self-driving. If they could actually pull off "Siri, take me to work", it would change things enough that normal cars would look like dumbphones compared to the iCar. But that's a pipe dream. Our roads are too chaotic for Level 5 to be feasible for a long, long time. In fact, I'm willing to bet that the reason this project lasted a whole decade was because Apple was throwing everything they had at Level 5 self-driving, and they canned it because after an entire decade they still couldn't make it work.
Not true. I helped cover Apple for a large investment bank before and after iPhone's launch. If anything, Apple was the one company that had the technology and market credibility to immediately make a splash in the market despite being totally foreign to it.
>and that US carriers would never give them enough control.
We did think that there was a real possibility of Apple launching its phone in conjunction with an MVNO. But this was again out of belief that Apple had the credibility to immediately have millions of customers switch to it as their carrier, not because Apple—of all companies—could not get what it wanted from carriers.
A car and a cell phone, or anything Apple has yet made, are wildly different. They may as well have had a battle tank program, or started making airplanes. Those things have screens and "infotainment systems" too.
Were they really close cousins in 2006?
Cars are wildly different, 50 years ago GE would have seemed like the one that would make a phone, not ford.